I've read two YA books recently where "who gets to be Homecoming/Prom King/Queen" is a central piece of the story. In "Pumpkin" (companion book to Dumplin' and Puddin'), the author kind of pulls this off partly by setting it in a tiny Texas town where I can believe that kids still care about this stuff, and partly by making the kids KIND of invest in it ironically. The other one, it's set at a big suburban high school in California, and ABSOLUTELY NOT, I do not believe for a millisecond that anyone at a big suburban high school in California unironically cares the tiniest bit about Homecoming Court.
Pumpkin is pretty good and does some stuff that's honestly pretty unusual in YA. (I kept comparing it as I read to Simon and the Homosapiens Agenda, which I also loved. But Simon is set in a suburb of Atlanta, and the kids are overwhelmingly wealthy suburbanites who are going on trips to pick out out-of-state colleges (Leah, you find out in the sequel, is kind of the exception, and -- not surprisingly -- she is ACUTELY aware of the class stuff to which Simon is entirely oblivious) while in Pumpkin, many of the kids are not going to college, and the main character's post-high school plan is like "...maybe community college? idk." The upper-middle-class suburban setting is incredibly ubiquitous in YA, so it was nice to see an authentic-feeling working-class small town.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2021-08-25 04:21 pm (UTC)Pumpkin is pretty good and does some stuff that's honestly pretty unusual in YA. (I kept comparing it as I read to Simon and the Homosapiens Agenda, which I also loved. But Simon is set in a suburb of Atlanta, and the kids are overwhelmingly wealthy suburbanites who are going on trips to pick out out-of-state colleges (Leah, you find out in the sequel, is kind of the exception, and -- not surprisingly -- she is ACUTELY aware of the class stuff to which Simon is entirely oblivious) while in Pumpkin, many of the kids are not going to college, and the main character's post-high school plan is like "...maybe community college? idk." The upper-middle-class suburban setting is incredibly ubiquitous in YA, so it was nice to see an authentic-feeling working-class small town.